earticle

영어

Carbon capture technology development is one of the main research topics in the field of climate change mitigation due to continuous increase of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere that caused “green house” effects leading to global warming. However, industries and businesses are reluctant in implementing the developed carbon capture technology because it needs capital investment and operational expense. There is a need to find carbon capture technology that can recover part of the investment and operational cost to make it more sustainable. In this paper, a system that captures CO2 and at the same time have the potential to recover capital and operation cost of the CO2 capture process was developed and characterized. This carbon capture system combined gas absorption combined with biofixation by converting the captured CO2 to algal biomass. In conventional system, CO2 is absorbed by an absorber which is usually a gas-liquid contacting system. The problem of this system is, what to do with the captured CO2?. Aside from that, the solution that absorbed CO2 may contain nitrogen in the form of ammonia or organic amines, which are fertilizers. If this solution is released to the receiving bodies of water, it may cause algal bloom and possible euthropication that may result in the eventual release of CO2 to the atmosphere. The system that we studied solves this problem by combining the absorption with biomass fixation system that converts the captured CO2 to algal biomass in a controlled environment. The harvested algal biomass was characterized for its suitability as biodiesel feedstock or as a biorefinery feedstock. The developed system may have a potential to be sustainable because part of the capital investment and the operating cost can be recovered from the potential revenue derived from the algal biomass.